Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Laura Doyle active and the passive part, the male and the female."7In these comparisons gendered polarities of passive and active provide meta phors for racial polarities, the neat fit of which in turn strengthens the effect of the gendered polarities.It is clear, at least on the level of metaphor, that racial and sexual mythologies grew and expanded together.Joyce parodies these intermingled mythologies, as we shall see.Such gendered racialism has roots not only in the colonial Euro pean and American pasts but further back in the European history of conquering and conquered "races."8Thus, German nationalists of the sixteenth century belittled Europe's "Romano-Welsche" or southern peoples by characterizing them as a "woman-race, a crowd of weaklings."9With the rise of nineteenth-century colonialist ra cialism, and in the wake of class revolutions in Europe, which were very much perceived as race revolutions in which the native con quered finally took up arms against their foreign conquerors, such gendered racial theories again found wide expression.In the mid nineteenth century Otto von Bismarck claimed that "the German, the teutonic race, may be regarded as embodying the virile, the fertilizing principle in Europe; but the Celtic and the Slav peoples are womanly races, passive, unproductive."10Likewise, Ludwig Feuerbach theorized that "the heart-the feminine principle, the sense of the finite, the seat of materialism-is French; the head the masculine principle, the seat of idealism-is German."11Note here that nationalities become essentialized by being conflated with races, as they often were in sexuo-racial theories of a century ago.Joyce works within this contemporary conflation.He also particu larly examines the metaphysics implicit in these racial and gender mythologies.We do know that Joyce owned several books which "proved" the biological hierarchy of races and sexes.Marilyn Reizbaum has es-7.Quoted ibid., 2.p. 8.For a thorough study of the importance of race in early European history, see Polia kov, Aryan Myth, and the older but classic work by Magnus Hirschfeld (produced in forced exile from Nazi Germany), Racism, trans.and ed.Cedar Paul and Eden Paul (New Yo rk: Kennikat Press, 1938).See also two eady works by Jacques Barzun, Th e French Race (New Yo rk: Columbia University Press, 1932), and Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (London: Methuen, 1940).These works establish the European affiliation of nation and race which Joyce inherits.9.
Source: Cornell University Press eBooks
Language: English
Topic: Giambattista Vico and Joyce
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4245835614